24 July 2017 12:50 PM

Of all the subjects I touched on in my MoS column, the one which has provoked most reaction is the short article on the film ‘Dunkirk’. The most surprising response, from apparently intelligent people, was that this film was in fact very good. I find it hard to accept that anyone intelligent can think this. Indeed, if an intelligent person does think it, it suggests to me that civilisation is further down the slimy slope of post-literacy than even I had suspected.

This was not a full-scale review, and simply pointed out a few aspects of the film which I disliked. I will now try to give a fuller, longer explanation of my concerns. Full disclosure: I was invited to a free preview of the film last Wednesday (at which, had I wished, I could have enjoyed a free bar before taking my seat) at the IMAX cinema in London, an enormous screen with powerful sound systems. Most film previews for the press take place in small viewing theatres in Soho. This was not restricted to the press (in fact I am not sure how the invitees were selected) and was plainly aimed at emphasising the film’s technical strengths – it was shot on 75 mm film well suited to the extra-large IMAX format, it did not use computer generated images (CGI) , a great deal of effort and skill had been devoted to aerial shots taken from real vintage aircraft etc.

I have never been especially interested in who *directs* films, I am not what they call a film buff. I just like going to the cinema and have done so since I enjoyably wasted many hours of my school holidays, sitting in the dark in the Gosport Ritz or its rival the ‘Criterion’, or the Odeon North End in Portsmouth, or come to that the Portsmouth Essoldo watching various sorts of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood or Pinewood tosh; and later on, the Oxford Scala. This was the scene of the famous moment when the revolutionary Tariq Ali, standing politely for the national anthem, got into hilariously unexpected difficulties. This is a ceremony which I can still remember taking place as late as 1968, when in tiny Bolshevik mood I refused to stand for it at the end of ‘the Charge of the Light Brigade’ at the Oxford ABC in George Street. There was some tutting, but a lot of people were already heading for the exit. Tariq, by contrast, was pelted with rubbish and told ‘Sit down, you fascist!’ by 1960s left-wing students. I also spent many happy hours in the Hampstead Everyman, the original Curzon, an unusually comfortable cinema in the maze of streets just north of Piccadilly, the old Academy in Oxford Street, the Swiss Cottage Odeon and several movie theatres (including the Bethesda Theatre Café, where sandwiches and wine were brought to your seat during the film) in and around Washington DC.

I have also spent many contented winter afternoons, frowsting in a warm room while the rain pelted down or the frost lay thick outside, and watching ancient black-and-white films on BBC2, and later on video and DVD.

I can just recall being taken by my late mother to see what must have been a 1950s revival of ‘Bambi’ in some vast cinema (as it then seemed to me) in Plymouth , a special occasion, for which we all dressed smartly, with usherettes guiding us to our seats with red-shaded torches. I was thrilled by the heavy curtains, the soft tip-up seats and the grandeur of the entrance. In those days and for some time afterwards, cinemas had actual restaurants on the premises, and there were many heavy ropes and much polished brass. Long afterwards, I found that many of the grander corners of the Soviet Union had been designed on much the same principle. The last time I recall this fully ceremonial aspect of cinema was when I went to London to see ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ I think at the Metropole near Victoria, because it was then only being shown in London and would not come to the provinces for some months.

I did develop an antipathy to some very popular films. I have never seen ‘Mary Poppins’ or ‘the Sound of Music’, and now doubt if I ever shall. My enjoyment of war films faded as I became more left-wing.

I have no ‘favourite’ film, as different sorts of films serve different purposes, but among those I have greatly enjoyed are Hitchcock’s ‘Foreign Correspondent’ which I know more or less by heart (I used to like ‘The 39 Steps’ but have grown tired of it, as I have grown tired of the book it’s loosely based on), ‘The Cruel Sea’ (likewise learned almost by heart) , ‘In Which we Serve;’ ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’, ‘The Lady Killers’(original version, not the unnecessary remake), ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘The Woman in the Window’, ‘Double Indemnity’, , the 1958 ‘Dunkirk’, the original ‘Manchurian Candidate’ ‘North by North West’, ‘The Apartment’, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘Incident at Owl Creek’, ‘Dr Zhivago’ ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Fahrenheit 451’, ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ Crowd’(the 1960s version with Julie Christie), both (very different) versions of ‘The Quiet American’, ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, ‘The Verdict’, ‘Witness’ , ‘Galaxy Quest’, ‘Apollo 13’ ‘Groundhog Day’ and then it fades a bit. I used to watch a lot of French films, Chabrol especially, but doubt I’d want to now. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but you’ll notice there aren’t many recent films in it. In recent years I’ve *seen* a lot of films, ever in search of the old Essoldo thrill, but felt no great lasting affection for them.

Sometimes, I must admit, I go to be annoyed, much as I suppose Republicans go to watch the Orange marchers at Drumcree, as was the case with the recent ‘Churchill’. I think the same was true of ‘The King’s Speech’, as I knew from advance publicity that it was unlikely to please me. Nor did it.

The most outstanding film I have seen in recent years is the Polish film ‘Ida’, which is in my view a work of great genius, clever, moving, surprising, evocative, free of clichés, which was hardly shown in Britain at all.

And so we come to ‘Dunkirk’. I’ve written elsewhere about this subject here

This is because it interests me and has done since I first read the stories of ‘Gun Buster’, as a wide-eyed schoolboy, jammed into an armchair on grey holiday afternoons near the Hampshire shore that faced across the never-resting sea towards France and the worrying foreign world beyond. How safe those stories made me feel, behind the shield of the rolling main (as we called it in one of the patriotic songs we sang at school). Indeed, I am sure that one of the main feelings evoked by the Dunkirk events at the time, was a relief to be shot of silly foreign entanglements, alliances with France etc, and safely back in our snug island. Dorothy Sayers, as I have sometimes mentioned, wrote a poem about it.

‘Praise God, now, for an English war The grey tide and the sullen coast, The menace of the urgent hour, The single island, like a tower, Ringed with an angry host. This is the war that England knows, When all the world holds but one man

King Philip of the galleons, Louis, whose light outshone the sun’s, The conquering Corsican. When Europe, like a prison door, Clangs;

and the swift,enfranchised sea runs narrower than a village brook; And men who love us not, yet look to us for liberty; When no allies are left, no help to count upon from alien hands, No waverers remain to woo, No more advice to listen to, And only England stands. This is the war we always knew, When every county keeps her own, When Kent stands sentry in the lane And Fenland guards her dyke and drain, Cornwall, her cliffs of stone;

When from the Cinque Ports and the Wight, From Plymouth Sound and Bristol Town, There comes a noise that breaks our sleep, Of the deep calling to the deep Where the ships go up and down.

And near and far across the world Hold open wide the water-gates, And all the tall adventurers come Homeward to England, and Drake’s drum Is beaten through the Straits.

This is the war that we have known And fought in every hundred years, Our sword, upon the last, steep path, Forged by the hammer of our wrath On the anvil of our fears.

Send us, O God, the will and power To do as we have done before; The men that ride the sea and air are the same men their fathers were To fight the English war.

And send, O God, an English peace – Some sense, some decency, perhaps Some justice, too, if we are able, With no sly jackals round our table, Cringing for blood-stained scraps; No dangerous dreams of wishful men Whose homes are safe, who never feel The flying death that swoops and stuns, The kisses of the curtseying guns Slavering their street with steel; No dream, Lord God, but vigilance, That we may keep, by might and main, Inviolate seas, inviolate skies – But if another tyrant rise, Then we shall fight again.’

There must be many of my generation and the one before who would have felt much like that for many years after 1940.

For Dunkirk was not just a defeat. It was, though we are not supposed to say so, a relief. We had got involved in something too big for us, with allies we did not much like and on whom we could not rely, and now we would pluck our young men from danger and bring them safely back home. Safety, home and beauty. The tears come to the eyes at the thought of it.

Over there, men in coloured shirts, shouting, concentration camps, loudspeakers, the goose step, mass rallies, dive-bombers. And 20 miles away, cricket pitches, quiet pubs with gardens, vicars, flower-shows, the Jarrow March, the Home Guard, the TUC and the Beaverbrook Press. The great fun of crossing the Channel used to be that it was like going from one planet to another in a couple of hours of mild seasickness. Never was it more so than then.

But I digress. The subject is, in short, rich in possibilities. And they can be explored in dialogue, in the interactions between the British Tommy anxious to get home and the French Poilu who is already at home and can retreat no further; between the disciplined professional soldier, stoically accepting danger and discomfort and the new conscript, damp with terror at the howl of the Jericho Trumpets, those wailing sirens on the wings of Hitler’s Stuka dive-bombers; between the civilian enjoying prosperity in the Phoney War, who is eventually moved to take his pleasure boat into mortal danger and the other men he meets for the first time those who have seen the glaring, pitiless face of the war-god Mars, and have shrivelled at its awful gaze.

Perhaps at home one might hear the recriminations between those who have warned of war, and those who have ignored them (who are not necessarily who you think they are, as you may find if you read the late Lord Hailsham’s interesting book ‘The Left were Never Right’, written under his former name of Quintin Hogg).

And someone might even put in a proper word for the Navy, which, like the French, tends to get a bit left out of these narratives, but which made terrible sacrifices to get the Army home.

For this, we surely need identifiable characters, whose lives before the crisis we either know or can guess at. We need conversations. We need a continuous narrative, even two or three. Some, though not all, of these ideas were used in the 1958 film ‘Dunkirk’ which I much prefer.

I simply don’t think this new film provides for these needs. It just seeks to take us on a noisy, spectacular ride. It makes tiny concessions to them, the biggest being Mark Rylance’s boat journey, made in my view needlessly horrible and complicated by the highly unlikely presence of a man rescued from a sunken ship, who has been driven mad by his experiences on Dunkirk beach. As a result he does a terrible, futile thing to a wholly innocent character. This was the one event in the film which, paradoxically, moved me. I am still distressed by it, several days later. In the way that small individual miseries do, this futile ‘blue-on-blue’ tragedy is harder to bear than any of the mass deaths we see at a distance. Yet it has nothing to do with Dunkirk, as far as I can see.

And there are so many of these. The repeated scenes of sinking ships and drowning men created a sort of black cloud of misery in my head, of a kind which also forms when I become really badly seasick. Of course these things happened. But they did not predominate, as they do in the film. Had they done, there would have been no evacuation. I was already all but trembling from the wall of noise to which I was being subjected by the supposedly wonderful soundtrack.

What the new film was giving me was an ‘experience’, perhaps like some interactive game (how would I know? I don’t want to play interactive games), where I was having my senses directly buffeted.

But in my world, a literate, thoughtful one, films are supposed to combine their audiovisual power – colour, action, music, spectacle - with the subtler powers of speech and thought, while respecting the knowledge and understanding of the audience.

I felt my mind was being bypassed, and my senses directly assaulted. My mind, being full of ideas about this subject which were already there, resisted this assault, pretty fiercely. Perhaps that is why I felt ill as I clattered as fast as I could go down the steps afterwards, glad to be out once more in the hot, oily, traffic-stained evening air of modern London, a place I normally don’t much like. If you like this film, then I feel sorry for you. I hope that in time you learn enough about the world and about literature, music and art, to dislike it.

23 July 2017 2:06 AM

Why have so many perfectly sensible people suddenly turned into Bolshevik levellers and wild feminist fanatics?

The BBC’s revelations about what it pays its most prominent staff have prompted a seething mass of resentful raving, worthy of Chairman Mao or Germaine Greer at their worst, while thought and reason have been flung out of the window.

This is a country where missing the point gets you promoted, but for goodness’ sake, let us please think about this. The salaries involved are all unthinkably vast for most people. If it was ever possible for the great majority to get rich by working, it certainly isn’t now. That’s why the ghastly Lottery is so popular. An annual salary of £60,000 a year would be great riches for almost everyone in Britain.

DJ Chris Evans topped the list of the BBC's highest earners with a salary of £2 million

It can’t be otherwise. There isn’t enough wealth for us all to be opulent. But in a wise society we accept that there should be big rewards for exceptional talent and effort. And in a wise society, rather than hoping to pull such people down, we dream quietly of becoming one of the well-off.

Oh, and by the way, can we please stop using the daft measure of ‘paid more than the Prime Minister’? The PM’s pay is absurdly low, because two recent holders of the job were a grim puritan and a personally rich man, who held their salaries down so that they could look principled.

As for the supposed ‘discrimination’ against women, I expect you’d find a similar ‘discrimination’ against men among supermodels. So what? Maybe that will change in time, but it is a fact of life now.

Broadcast entertainment and news journalism have tended, until very recently, to be male-dominated activities. That’s all these figures mean. I can’t stand Chris Evans or Graham Norton, am baffled by the appeal of Vanessa Feltz and I don’t really know or care who Gary Lineker is, but I grasp that millions of other people like them a lot, and watch or listen to the BBC because they are on air.

And it’s that hard-to-measure factor which leads to these Hollywood salaries.

I’m much more puzzled as to why the uninteresting Mishal Husain is paid so much more than Jenni Murray or Jane Garvey, both far more engaging broadcasters, than I am bothered about supposed sexism.

Likewise I can’t see why the Today presenter Nick Robinson is paid so much more than his colleague Justin Webb, who is at the very least his equal in skill and appeal. By saying this, of course, I invite people to make similar remarks about me.

Well, let them. Because here’s the real point of this argument.

It’s not about high pay, or sexism. It’s about the fact that the BBC is financed by the licence fee. You can go to prison for not paying it. You cannot go to prison for not buying The Mail on Sunday, which is why I’m not currently planning to publish details of my own pay.

The real issue is that the BBC is not really responsible to anyone, for anything. Politicians fear to bully it, and in any case they represent themselves, not us. Its internal government is full of dim bureaucrats who couldn’t find Birmingham on a blank map of Britain, and who cannot take or respond to criticism.

What the BBC needs is a small, powerful, mostly elected supervisory board, picked by licence-payers and free of party politics. Candidates for such a board would get airtime on all BBC stations to stand for office. Among other things, it could ask if these high salaries are truly needed to stop talent being poached elsewhere, often a very thin case.

It could demand the return of real quality to drama and documentaries, and it could appoint independent commissioners to investigate complaints of bias and inaccuracy, which are currently fended off with delay and evasion. But we will only get such a thing if people are not distracted into frenzies of envy and political correctness.

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08 June 2014 12:04 AM

We are ignoring a European crisis that is going to change all our lives irreversibly and for ever. It is the huge, tragic surge of African migrants across the Mediterranean.

Once inside the borderless European Union, these newcomers can and will settle anywhere. There is no law or power that can stop them.

I first became aware of this when I went to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa. I had gone to tease Spain for moaning about Gibraltar, while it had its own Gibraltar in Morocco.

But much more serious was the virtual siege of Ceuta (and its nearby twin, Melilla) by migrants, immense numbers of them, crowding up against the 20ft fences which are all that separate this little piece of Spain from Africa. They climbed. They swam round or paddled past the barricade in makeshift rafts. It was impossible to stop all of them getting through. They walk thousands of miles from all the many famines, massacres and civil wars (often started by us) which beset that tragic continent.

Following the building of an effective fence between Greece and Turkey, migrants from Asia and the Middle East who used to come through Greece are now also coming to Europe by sea alongside countless Africans.

This problem has grown much worse since we madly overthrew Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi (who tried to stop the refugees) and turned that country into a failed state with no control over its own coastline.

Official figures, probably severe underestimates, say 31,000 crossed from Africa to Europe in 2013. Some 42,000 have tried to reach Italy alone this year. Hundreds drown in the attempt.

It reminds me of how the US-Mexican border used to be 20 years ago, when they simply could not cope with the multitudes of economic migrants hurrying across the muddy dribble that is the Rio Grande. For in summer, the Mediterranean, like the Rio Grande, is no real barrier. If they can reach the north coast of Africa, they can reach Italy, Greece or Spain. And then they can get to Calais.

That vast illegal migration from Mexico helped to transform the USA into the bilingual, multicultural nation it has since become. Something similar may be in store for Europe.

Actually I admire the migrants’ bravery and determination. Nobody can blame them for wanting to leave their blasted war zones. Nobody, in turn, could blame the nations of Europe if they said they could not cope with them (for they cannot) and took serious steps to stop them coming.

As it is, the political leaders of the Continent prefer not to face the problem at all, leaving the worst-affected states to do what they can and hoping the problem will go away, while it gets bigger all the time. It would be a good start if we admitted that this is actually happening.

We MUST ask: What was their heroism for?

Since I first blundered on to the edge of war, and saw what bullets do to human flesh and bone, I have given daily thanks that my generation never had to fight. These days, when I watch old films of D-Day, I imagine myself, trembling and gibbering with fear and cold, turning tail and running rather than face the German guns.

I still don’t know how they did it, soft human flesh running head on into hard, cruel metal.

And I also wonder, more and more, how it came about that young men found themselves having to do this horrible thing. And so, while I honour them for it, and understand why they had to do it, I do not honour those politicians whose vanity and stupidity made it necessary.

If we are serious about revering these men, and I am very serious about it, hasn’t the time come to look once again at the 1939 war, and how it came about, and whether it was as good a war as it is cracked up to be?

For if we don’t, how will we avoid the same thing happening again? In my experience, most of my generation still have a glamorised, idealised view of the Second World War that has little to do with what really took place.

Those who actually fought in it generally shut up about the horrid details. The only D-Day veteran I ever knew, asked to describe what it was like to step ashore at Arromanches that morning, would only say: ‘There seemed to be rather a lot of sand flies about.’

An equally eloquent silence is to be found in the war cemetery at Bayeux, where the terse and hopelessly sad inscriptions on the graves of all those 18-year-olds will reduce anyone to helpless tears in less than a minute.

Guns aren't the real mass killers

Here are two reasons to wonder if ‘more gun laws’ is the right response to the increasingly frequent rampage killings that seem to be happening almost everywhere, even though guns are no more common than they used to be.

One: According to the American news network ABC, Santa Barbara mass killer Elliot Rodger had been taking the mind-altering drug Alprazolam, a benzodiazepine. A large number of mass killers have been found – when investigated – to have been using legal or illegal mind-altering drugs. In many cases the authorities have not bothered to find out, so the correlation might be even stronger.

Two: Canada already has tighter gun laws, yet there has just been a rampage shooting in the quiet Canadian city of Moncton. Finland, as strict as Canada, and Germany, which has even tighter gun controls, have also been affected.

Could we for once actually think about this, instead of just reacting?

------------------

President Barack Obama tells us we must stay in the EU to suit the needs of the USA.

And he tells Scotland it must stay in the UK for the same reason. Which part of ‘national sovereignty’ does this President not understand?

I wouldn’t blame Scots for voting ‘Yes’ just to make it clear that foreign politicians should stay out of their business. For the rest of us it’s more complicated. The USA has been trying to cram us into a federal Europe since the 1940s, for its own benefit, not ours.

But wasn’t it American pressure that forced us to give in to the IRA in 1998, in an agreement that will lead, in the end, to Northern Ireland leaving the UK? Does one hand know what the other’s doing?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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24 March 2014 3:35 PM

I thought I’d try to reply to the many interesting responses to my recent articles about the Ukraine crisis. I think this is by far the most important and interesting event taking place at the moment (though the hideous overcrowding of our prisons seems to me to be gravely neglected).

So I make no apology for dealing with it at length. It raises fascinating questions about national motives and interests, the true nature of title to territory, the existence or non-existence of international law and justice, the power of myth in history, and the weird willingness of peoples to be led towards wars which, when they happen, will ruin their lives to an extent they currently can’t imagine.

I’m not actually that keen on the much-praised novel ‘Old Filth’ and its sequel ‘The Man in the Wooden Hat’ by Jane Gardam. There’s something unsatisfactory about them that I can’t quite put my finger on, though I think it’s partly the very large amount of hindsight in their descriptions and characterisations of actions taken in a very different past. But in them there is one passage about the immediate aftermath of the start of World War Two in Britain, or at least the real war once the invasion scare got going. It’s the disappearance of simple pleasures, symbolised by the empty, plundered chocolate machines on railway station platforms, with their empty drawers hanging open, which somehow symbolise the immediate huge drop in everyone’s standard of life, a drop that would in fact last for 15 years of rationing and austerity.

I now know about the stripping of national wealth that was taking place at the same time, and of course we all know about the hecatombs of deaths and maimings which are about to follow. But the penury and privation of war, even for non-combatants in unoccupied, uninvaded countries, are hugely miserable. To the end of her life, my mother (who lived through the 1939-45 war as a young woman) could not throw away an egg-shell without running her finger round it to remove the very last of the white. And when she bought Mars Bars for me and my brother she would always cut them up into several small portions, unable to get used to a plenty in which such things were available, all the time, to everyone .

One reader objects to my dismissal of Ukraine as a ‘made-up country’ and says : ‘Surely if you actually believed that you would be calling for Northern Ireland to be given to Ireland, as it is a 'made up country' (a term you never define, simply using it as a slur…’) .

Actually I have never supported the existence of Northern Ireland as a separate state or even province. I have many times said that I think the establishment of the Stormont Parliament was a mistake, that it arose out of the British establishment’s unspoken desire to abandon the six counties when they got the chance, and that Northern Ireland should have been governed from London from the start.

As for what I mean by a ‘made-up country’, I suppose I mean one that could not sustain its existence unless powerful outside interests allowed or encouraged it to do so, or deterred nearby powers from suppressing it.

‘Travis’ offered a careful and thoughtful counter to my long posting on ‘Between the Crisis and the catastrophe’.

He said : ’.. now that Russia itself has invaded and annexed part of a sovereign state, he [that’s me, PH] has put himself in the ludicrous position of defending this act of blatant aggression and expansionism by claiming that it is an act of self-defense. Yes, eastern Ukraine has a large population of ethnic Russians, a great many of which support assimilation into Russia. Yes, Ukraine is considered the heartland of Russian and Slavic culture. Yes, the Ukrainian state is "made up", in the sense that it exists more as a state than as a nation. But Ukraine is also an independent country, which has just had its sovereignty grossly violated and its territory dismembered without provocation. There was no threat, spoken or implied, made by Ukraine to Russia.’

**I respond. I don’t use the ‘heartland’ argument, regarding it as essentially sentimental. Nor am I especially interested in the Russian ethnic minorities. Provided their language and culture are respected, and they are not second-class citizens, their existence is not a pretext for outside intervention. Frontiers will inevitably trap some people in the ‘wrong’ place and civilised states have to accommodate this.

But I disagree that there was ‘no threat, spoken or implied. The threat does not come from Ukraine, which couldn’t threaten its way out of a wet paper bag, being a military and economic weakling. It comes *from those who use Ukraine*.

Many, for instance, rightly lament the plight of Ukrainians, governed by corrupt and incompetent oligarchs( a feature of both the major factions which have tussled for power and spoils in Kiev since independence). They then make a huge logical leap, perhaps hoping nobody will notice it, of assuming that the signing of an association agreement with the EU will in some way end Ukraine’s corrupt and squalid governance. Why would that be so? What is the process by which the EU would place incorruptible youth at the prow of Ukraine.

It may have been bliss in that dawn to have been alive, and to have been young may have been very heaven, but the Orange Revolution (which was much nicer than the more recent armed putsch) foundered with amazing speed on the rocks of reality. Ukraine is completely broke, and what wealth it has, has mostly been stolen. What economy it has is far more compatible with Russia than with the EU, and has suffered through separation from Russia..

And then there seems to be this belief that EU membership automatically makes a country free, law-governed a prosperous, supported by claims that Poland is a tremendous success. Come now. Poland is such as success that it exports hundreds of thousands of its young people in the search for work, and its early years in the EU were marked by a violent riot amid Warsaw’s new shiny shops, staged by coalminers from Katowice (no western paradise when I was last there) who saw it as threat to their jobs. As for Romanian and Bulgaria, does anyone really think they’re anywhere near the levels of transparency achieved in the more advanced parts of the EU?

Anyway, these former Warsaw pact countries, plus the three Baltic states, did not undergo the full 74 years of Bolshevism. They were independent and had rational economies until the outbreak of World War Two. They had recent, living memories of non-Soviet life and thought. They did not undergo the Russian Civil Wars or the Great Purge. The visitations of the NKVD/MGB/KGB were terrible, but not as terrible as what had already happened in the actual pre-1939 USSR.

Ukraine ,with the tiny (and important and telling) exception of the small area round Lemberg/Lwow/Lvov/Lviv, and of sub-Carpathian Ukraine, did by contrast undergo the complete Bolshevik package from soup to nuts, and from Lenin to Gorbachev. The EU has never attempted to incorporate any other territory which has had thus experience. Believe me, it makes a difference. The Bolsheviks never succeeded in creating Homo Sovieticus, but they did a lot to destroy civility and honesty in human life, and it will take a century or more to recover, if it ever does.

So let us forget any stuff about the benefit of Ukrainians. That’s propaganda. The EU association agreement, like all EU agreements with possible members, is political. It is about power, EU power if you insist (though I tend to think that is a polite way of expressing something else) , but power nonetheless. And if you insert your power into a country which is in someone else’s sphere of influence, you challenge, and seek to diminish, the power of someone else. In that case, that someone else is Russia. It was a threat. I say it again. The EU is the reverse of Clausewitz. It is the continuation of war by other means. In this case it is the heir to Friedrich Naumann’s liberal German plan to establish ‘Mitteleuropa’, a German sphere of mixed political and economic control, extending across Ukraine to the edge of the Caucasus. Naumann is the direct political ancestor of the German liberal party, the Free Democrats, whose luminary Hans-Dietrich Genscher pursued a subtle and clever eastward policy during the closing years of the Cold War, and whose heirs still sit in the Berlin Foreign Ministry which now stands on the corner of Underwater Street (Unterwasserstraße) and Werderscher Markt in that fine city.

‘Travis’ adds : 'Peter might say that the western powers "provoke" Russia by attempting to draw Ukraine into the EU sphere of influence, but given what has happened, this just doesn't hold water. It wasn't Britons or Americans or Germans who packed into Kiev's independence square to fight for Yanukovych's ouster: Ukrainians did that.

***I answer this point above. Ukrainians may have thought that was what they were doing. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they all had it right. The keen and well-organised involvement of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor, who rightly viewed the whole thing as an anti- Russian exercise and have never hidden this, suggests that some of the demonstrators knew very well what was really going on. The rest (as has been the case on every demonstration in which I have ever taken part, either as sucker or manipulator, or which I have ever seen) were filled with vaguer utopian or idealist aspirations, and were being used.

Travis adds: ‘And to say that an uprising among the Ukrainian people against a Ukrainian government is nothing more than a western attempt to make Russia vulnerable’

***Ah but I don’t say it was 'nothing more than that'. I am happy to concede, and have done on RT, that many of the demonstrators may have believed that they had higher motives, and indeed had them. That does not alter the fact that those purposes were hopelessly impractical, and that they were being used by others who did have aggressive power-seeking motives.

I do not know who if anyone organised the demonstrators, arranged for their tents and feeding, advised them that you can camp on a paved square if you lay down styrofoam blocks etc (who’d have known that?) . Maybe it was spontaneous. Coincidence theorists will doubtless argue so. I am not so sure. But the presence on the ‘Maidan’ of Victoria Nuland, Guido Westerwelle, John McCain and Cathy Ashton cannot be attributed to accident, and I am interested that the defenders of this episode never try to explain or defend this gross interference in Ukrainian national sovereignty.

In what normal, proud, patriotic country would a crowd welcome the blatant interference in their internal affairs of foreign politicians? If this quartet are so interested in fighting for liberty and against corruption, oligarchy and injustice, on the borders of the EU, why haven’t they been in Taksim Square in Istanbul, a country far closer to EU membership than Ukraine? And leaving aside the EU, why haven’t they been in Tahrir Square in Cairo, inveighing against the monstrous , violent and repressive military junta, which seized power in Egypt through a blatant coup, whose true nature they have mostly yet to admit?

‘Travis’ must really learn to penetrate the rather crude disguises in which power advances itself. Anomalies of this kind (why are they in A, but not in B and C where the same conditions apply? Why do they object to Y when X does it, but not when Z does it?)are often the best clue.

He says the burden of my argument ‘is to completely dismiss the sovereign agency of the Ukrainian people themselves.’

I think I have explained above why this isn’t so.

Then he asks : ‘ Does the Ukraine itself, as a sovereign state, not have the right to chart its own course, even if that course takes it into alignment with the EU?’

**To which I reply, I am not sure what he means by ‘the right’? Does Texas have the ‘right’ to secede from the USA? Does the South Tirol have the ‘right’ to demand reunification with Austria and the end of Italian rule? Does Flanders have the ‘right’ to demand unification with the Netherlands, and the breaking of the shackles of Belgium?

(By the way, when I mentioned the reluctance of Italy or Spain or France top permit secession by various minority peoples the other day, some contributors wrote in about a poll in Veneto on this subject . This was not an officially sanctioned poll and had no legal force. Nor is any such poll likely to happen, unless local terrorists , supported by the USA, force Rome to concede one (as happened in Northern Ireland) ).

In these and many other cases, the question is decided by common sense, the desire to avoid (or alternatively to create) war and conflict . If we decided that frontiers were about ‘rights' and 'justice’, it is hard to think of a frontier that could not be opened to question, and an interference that could not be allowed. If Mexico or Canada sought the ‘right’ to join an alliance with Russia or China, I imagine the USA would have something pretty stern to say about that, and I have a feeling that the government involved would not last many months after expressing such an intention.

So the answer to the question is that it might have such a ‘right’ in the abstract. But in reality it might well come at the expense of dangerous conflict. Does ‘Travis’ believe he or anyone has the right to take such risks?

It is only this widespread view that Russia is not a country, but a threat, which allows people to treat its legitimate desires so lightly. Why is it, I ask again and again, that Russia of all countries is denied the courtesies allowed to others, many of them just as bad if not worse in their internal governance? It’s an anomaly, a warning that what you see is a disguise, a mask, not a true face.

The row with Russia is about something else.

Travis rightly criticises Russia’s crude propaganda about protecting its people. In agree with him. I thought it false and needless, and here condemn it unequivocally. I am not writing about ‘loyalty to one’s kin’, but about national sovereignty, a wholly different thing.

As for the comparison to the Anschluss (it makes a change from the Sudetenland) , quite a lot of open minded people would have said (before Hitler and the National Socialists came along) that the post-Versailles ban on Germany and Austria uniting was one of the stupidest clauses of Versailles. I note it has now been quietly reversed by Schengen and the Euro, and the Anschluss has been achieved, quietly, by the EU.

‘Steven’ opines that ‘Mr. Hitchens's desperate attempts to equate the military invasion by Russia of the territory of a neighbouring state with what he calls a "bureaucratic, economic and legal invasion" by the EU are not remotely credible. He can't comprehend that the European Union is an entity that has obtained its powers not through military aggression but through voluntary and peaceful transfer of sovereignty by the democratically elected governments of its individual member states. Countries are not obliged to join it and are free to leave it any time they want (Article 50 TEU).’

***Are they ‘desperate’? The European Union’s accretion of powers has not been done very openly (all of them in fact irreversible by any act short of secession ,and what does ‘Steven’ reckon are the chances of any country that seeks to exercise this supposed right?). He should read ‘the Great Deception’ by Christopher Booker and Richard North. Most members of the EU have been ushered in, by the decision of their own elites, themselves under considerable pressure to do so. It is only alter that they find out what the vast inheritance of the ‘Acquis Communitaire’ means in practice for their freedom of action. Of course, the less free and independent a country is in the first place, the easier it will be for it to undergo this process. But I think the description offered by ‘Steven’ is disingenuous.

He then says : ‘The sad fact is that Mr. Hitchens's hostility and contempt for the European Union is now so acute that he can openly declare, repeatedly, in public, that he "likes" Vladimir Putin. Is this dignified behaviour for a respected and seasoned reporter of foreign affairs? Why not just remain aloof and objective, and concede (as many of us do) that both sides are at fault in this confrontation, that both sides are guilty of cynical power politics? Is it really worth sacrificing your impartiality just to cling to the out-dated concept of the "nation state" (whatever that is) and a forlorn hope of returning to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia?’

Well, I am a journalist and a reporter, but one who happens to believe that people in my position should be open about our opinions, rather than trying to influence others by stealth under a false pretence of impartiality or 'objectivity'. I am surprised and discomfited by my own opinions on Russia. But I openly profess them because they *are* my opinions, and because I hold them as a result of experience and thought, rather than prejudice. I hated the USSR and had little time for Russia (wrongly thinking it synonymous with the USSR) when I went to live there. I learned otherwise in the years that followed .

After witnessing the KGB attack on the Vilnius TV Tower in January 1991, I was for some months afterwards filled with a righteous anger against the Soviet system, and an irrational hostility to individual Russians, which I had to fight to hide. This lifted like a fog in August 1991 after the failure of the KGB putsch in Moscow itself, which I also witnessed first hand. I was then flung into a mental turmoil about the whole subject of Russia’s future (for some time I was beguiled by Boris Yeltsin, a folly I now deeply regret) from which I have reached my current position.

I have no idea why the concept of that nation state is ‘outdated’ . It is not a sausage or an egg, and does not decay with time. People must really get out of the habit of assuming that because something has existed for a long time, it must be wrong, or that because something is new it must be right. Hasn’t experience cast some doubt on this view? Nor do I see why the nation state requires inverted commas. It is the largest unit in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish, loyalty to it permits sacrifice and generosity on a large scale, and is the foundation of tolerance. If ‘Steven ‘ is against the nation state, perhaps he should say why, and what he thinks should replace it, rather than appealing to fashion as his argument. I cannot see why it is a ‘forlorn hope’ to return to the common sense and wisdom which were so dearly bought at the Peace of Westphalia. The whole point of having a historical memory is that we avoid repeating our stupid mistakes. What exactly has happened since 1648 to invalidate the wisdom of that treaty?

‘Paul P’ says ‘Mr Hitchens is wont to compare Nazism with Communism, that is to say Hitlerism with Stalinism, as if they were of equal evil standing. But that is not the case. While Hitler and his racial theories of supremacy drove Nazism to evil almost without bounds, Stalin was merely routinely brutal in his communism - as brutal as any Genghis Khan or any Pol Pot. It was of the same order of disinterested brutality of the animal kingdom in general, and to this extent it marked Stalin down as a de facto animal - to be dispatched with as little pity as he showed others.’

This may not even be true. Stalin was in many ways a violent racialist and persecuted, to the point of murder, several ethnic groups. Had he lived, he would have pursued a severe pogrom against Soviet Jews. I am not sure in any case why extermination on the basis of class or opinion is less evil than extermination on the basis of ethnic origin. And I am not sure that killing people through grief, callousness, starvation and exhausting slavery in dangerous places is in any moral way less reprehensible than gassing them. I think a lot of this results from the fact that there are no films of liberating armies throwing open Stalin’s death camps and revealing the skeletal victims and the piles of corpses. That is because they were never liberated, but were maintained by our main ally and then closed as secretly as they had been operated.

He also writes, rather obscurely ‘We at last saw darkness descending and found the necessary fortitude. There were to be no more 'Czechoslovakias'. It happened to be Poland, and so Poland it was. "Churchill was indeed a great man, but his achievement was to secure our bare survival, which came at the desperate cost of our national wealth and our empire." The operative word here, and of the only interest given the circumstances of the time, is 'survival'. It equates to victory in war over the Nazis. Victory in peace, albeit a peace fraught with the threat of Armageddon, over the abominable Soviet regime would be secured at minimal cost over many years.’

I’m not sure what point he seeks to make. What was it to us what happened to Poland or Czechoslovakia? If the fates of these countries *are* important in the argument, then surely the fact that the country we chose to ‘save’ went down into the pit has some bearing on the case for war? If it doesn’t matter, then what did we go to war for?

If it was for our own benefit what benefit was that? Having gone to war, we either had to make terms with Hitler, or to fight to the end. Had Hitler defeated Stalin in 1941, we would have had to make terms anyway, as all serious historians recognise. There was no automatic American rescue coming, despite the widespread delusion that the USA was our warm loving ally. If we had not gone to war for Poland , we would not have been in that trap. Nor would France, for without us she would never have declared war in 1939. We could have (like the USA) have used the period to retain an armed neutrality while we rearmed, and (like the USA) entered the European war when it suited us. We would also have compelled Germany to retain large forces on its Western frontier, in case we attacked. But once we were in, it was a choice between hanging on to the end (even if it led, as it did, to bankruptcy and the loss of empire) or making disgraceful terms.

For what did we put ourselves in this dreadful position? Who was saved, helped, or otherwise benefited by this decision? I’ve never understood, and would be grateful if someone could explain.

A brief divergence to deal with ‘Abbasong’, who writes ‘Peter. Re Liberal Crime Policies. This seems to be an oxymoron in that one cannot have liberal crime policies - a reluctance to imprison offenders - whilst having prisons full to bursting.’

No, This is wrong. Liberal crime policies are a sop to the voters. Liberals only maintain prisons because it is politically necessary. They only retain prison sentences because it is politically necessary. They would close all the prisons tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it. But even if they try desperately hard not to use prison, or to send anyone there (and so they only do so when they have already become experienced recidivists) , they end up with bursting prisons, because their policies encourage so much crime that they are forced to go through the motions. I agree that the policy is itself mad, but once you have understood that, it makes perfect sense.

Geoffrey Warner and others object to my equation of Neville Chamberlain at Munich and Winston Churchill at Yalta, both giving way to appeasers.

Of course it is true that Stalin took Poland and Eastern Europe. But so did Hitler take Czechoslovakia and Austria. Both the Munich and Yalta conferences contained the same delusion, that we could do anything about it. At Yalta, we had the sense to give Stalin what we had to give him, and to swallow our pride, rather than seeking future war with him to make ourselves feel better about our previous surrender. Lord Halifax’s wounded pride after Munich led us to make the Polish guarantee, which doomed us as a great power by placing our national fate in the hands of Colonel Beck, Warsaw's unscrupulous Foreign Minister. The rest we know. The problem is that we still pretend that this hopeless, incompetent episode was our Finest Hour, and that anyone who dares suggest it wasn’t is falsely accused of sympathising with Hitler, or of dishonouring the memory of those who died in the war.

23 March 2014 1:41 AM

Stupidity and ignorance rule the world. The trouble is that the stupid and the ignorant think that they are clever and well-informed.

Take Mrs Hillary Clinton, next President of the United States and former chief of American foreign policy. She has directly compared Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. And she has compared events in Crimea to the Czech crisis of 1938.

Dozens of other politicians and grandiose journalists are currently doing the same.

It’s the one thing they think they know about history – that Britain’s pathetic Neville Chamberlain didn’t stand up to evil Adolf Hitler in 1938 at Munich over Czechoslovakia, so making Hitler believe that he could take over the world. And that the brave Winston Churchill then saved the world.

Almost no part of this legend is true. Even those bits that are true are misleading, with one exception. Hitler was certainly evil. But so was Stalin, the communist mass-murderer who ended up as our main ally in the fight against Hitler.

If we had gone to war to save Czechoslovakia in 1938, we would have been beaten. We had no proper army. Nor did the USA, whose army at that time was about the same size as Portugal’s.

When we later went to war to ‘save’ Poland, we didn’t in fact save it at all, leaving it to be bombed, starved and massacred by Hitler, carved up between Germany and the USSR and later swallowed whole by Stalin. And we were beaten – just not actually invaded.

Churchill was indeed a great man, but his achievement was to secure our bare survival, which came at the desperate cost of our national wealth and our empire. Later in the war, Churchill appeased Stalin by giving him the whole of Poland and Eastern Europe. Just like Chamberlain at Munich seven years before, he had no choice. The Yalta conference, which finalised these arrangements, was as disgracefully self-interested as Munich.

Yet the silly, half-educated politicians of today still like to pose as tough guys with the following formula, addressed to anyone who suggests that Russia might have a case over Ukraine and Crimea.

Apart from knowing nothing about European history, and apart from their bone-headed inability to distinguish Christian Russia from the communist USSR, these people also don’t understand what is going on in Ukraine.

It never occurs to them that Russia has good historical reasons to fear its neighbours. It never crosses their mind that the borders drawn by the victorious West in 1992, like those drawn at Versailles in 1919, are an unsustainable, unjust mistake.

They never ask why Britain (or the USA) should be hostile to Russia, or what the quarrel between us actually is. What is it to us whose flag flies over Sevastopol? Yet it matters greatly to those who live there.

They cast every Russian action as evil, and every Ukrainian action as saintly. The world is not like that.

I hated the old USSR as an evil empire. But, having lived in Moscow, I feel a strong affection for post-communist Russia and count Russians as good friends. That does not make me an apologist for Mr Putin. I have repeatedly condemned him for his suppression of opposition and the many evil things done by his state. I can see his faults and do not pretend they do not exist.

But the warmongers are selectively blind. Hardly any British news media have mentioned an event in Kiev last week. A group of five louts, one of them an MP from the thuggish, racialist ‘Svoboda’ party, forced their way into the office of Oleksandr Panteleymonov, chief of the main Ukrainian TV station. There they physically attacked him and shouted anti-Russian racial abuse at him.

The MP involved is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on ‘Freedom of Speech’. And the louts were so proud of what they did that they filmed it and posted it on the internet.

These people are supposed to be our allies and friends.

On their behalf, our Prime Minister is puffing himself up like a bullfrog, and busily creating a new Cold War that will benefit nobody except spies and weapons-makers, for a cause he doesn’t understand and can’t explain.

If this is the kind of statesman it produces, it strikes me that Eton can’t be such a good school after all.

Nazi-obsessed movie world has lost the plot

There’s something about a swastika that captivates film-makers and publishers. But is the effect at last wearing off?

The recent film The Book Thief has a daft plot and an even dafter voice-over, supposedly provided by the Angel of Death. It hasn’t been a wild success, and no wonder. If it weren’t set in Nazi Germany, with plenty of swastikas, would it have been made at all?

Meanwhile, really interesting moral puzzles in the modern world don’t seem to attract film-makers. On a recent visit to New York, I saw the fascinating Israeli thriller Bethlehem, about an Arab youth who collaborates with the Israelis. One of its many themes is how well Jews and Arabs get on when left to their own devices.

How I long for someone to make films out of the fine stories of Matt Rees, set in this part of the world.

******

Half a century of liberal crime policies under all parties have utterly failed. As I write, the prisons of England and Wales (I expect Scotland is much the same) are full almost to bursting. I am not sure why this isn’t a major story.

Some figures: in 1960, the England and Wales prison population was 27,000. By 1990, it had hit almost 45,000. Last week it stood at 85,338, with room for only 568 more. It won’t take long to find them.

Remember, this has happened despite the watering down of all penalties and the repeated slashing of sentences. Yet nobody learns from it. It will be ‘solved’ by letting more prisoners out, and sending fewer criminals to prison.

******

‘Child care’ actually means child neglect. The Government is bribing us with our own money, to dump our children with strangers. The only thing they won’t subsidise is children being raised by their own married parents. That’s penalised, and despised.

*******

Why rejoice at the abolition of annuities? It’s just an admission that saving of all kinds is pointless when interest is microscopic and state-sponsored inflation is debauching the currency.

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07 October 2013 3:17 PM

It was quite hard to do (the first one I ordered never reached me, only fuelling my determination) , but I’ve finally obtained a copy of the ‘The Big Pick-Up’ by the late Elleston Trevor (born Trevor Dudley-Smith 1920-1995, author of the ‘Quiller’ books under the name Adam Hall), the novel on which the 1958 film ‘Dunkirk’ is partly based. The film never attained the popularity of other war films, probably because most of it was deeply pessimistic. There are jaunty moments, as the ‘little ships’ set off , but much of it is necessarily grim.

It is nothing like as grim as the book. And, though described as ‘The Definitive Dunkirk Novel’, this work seems to me to be very little-known. I wonder if public libraries still stock it.

I had long been aware that the fictional accounts of the retreat and its aftermath by ‘Gun Buster’, in ‘Return via Dunkirk’ and ‘Battle Dress’ (both published soon afterwards and very successful) had been sanitised for morale purposes. The careful reader can see that the writer is holding back on the horrors quite a bit, though they occasionally intrude on the edges of some of his short stories of headlong retreat, collapsing flanks, sudden death, fifth columnists and narrow escapes. In a similar way Nicholas Monsarrat’s ‘Cruel Sea’ was published in a ‘cadet edition’ for schoolboys. The unexpurgated adult version is a good deal starker about the hideousness of war

But Mr Trevor’s book – while it demands to be read once you have begun it – is relentlessly dispiriting. It is one disaster after another, with several unpleasant deaths, more despair than most will like, a lot of straightforward, unconcealed accounts of human fear and pain, hunger, blood-letting, desertion and physical cowardice treated with unusual sympathy - and one morally disturbing incident I shall come to later which must have been drawn from the life- or death. These are real men, with all their faults and natural functions. Given that it was written ten years after the war and five years before the Chatterley Trial (which was in 1960, not 1963) it is remarkably frank about both the gruesomeness of war, about fear and about sexual matters. A curious scene of debauchery and rape, in the midst of the bombardment of Dunkirk itself, has that feeling of waking nightmare, without a real beginning or end, which such events really have. Did it happen? I suspect so.

He wrote it after advertising for reminiscences from Dunkirk veterans (he himself had been an RAF flight engineer, working on Spitfires, debarred by his light-sensitive eyes from actual flying).

Its cover is initially misleading. It is one of those 1950s ‘Pan’ books, calculated to provide a nostalgic shiver to those of us who remember station bookstalls full of them (and simultaneously remember the accompanying clanking and wheezing of filthy and decrepit old BR steam engines shuddering past) , designed by a genius with plenty of red and yellow in the cover illustration.

It looks, at first glance, a bit like one of the War Picture Library comic books (they’d be called ‘Graphic Novels’ now, I suppose), with their simple patriotic plots, their rockfisted, huge-chinned heroes and their guttural, sinister Germans shouting ‘Achtung!’ as they die, defeated. A fellow-passenger on my Oxford-bound train glanced at the cover and looked rather pityingly at me, obviously thinking I was revisiting my boyhood, rather late.

But when you look again, at the soldiers in their Hore-Belisha battledress blazing uselessly at a German dive-bomber with their World War One rifles, and one of their unarmed comrades shaking his fist at it, it’s not quite as it first appears. Behind stretches the beach under a filthy cloud (why do people always say ‘pall’? Do they even know what a ‘pall’ really is?) of smoke, while bombs fall on the long, passive lines of men waiting with diminishing hope for a boat home.

Right to the end, the small group of men who are the book’s central characters (‘heroes’ hardly fits) meet reverse after reverse after reverse. They are described as having holes running right through them, in a passage which is a bit too literary for the purpose, but you know what he means. ‘Nice to hear some of our guns actually being fired for a change’, muses one. They are deeply demoralised by the knowledge of defeat and the misery of impotence in retreat, rejoicing at the smallest sign that our own side still has the power to hit back. Their near-obscene joy as a German bomber is shot down and it strikes the earth, its incinerated crew still alive and screaming, is entirely convincing. I have been told by several separate sources that the experience of being bombed when unable to hit back is one of the most distressing and infuriating known to man.

There are several points at which Trevor’s characters express views of war which come close to pacifism, the strange licence given to civilised men to become, and to be obliged to be the opposite of what they would be in peacetime. A man who would run to save someone from a burning building during peace, rejoices to see the building and its occupants burn in war. There is also a puzzlement as to what exactly the war is about, and how they can have got into this mess in the first place, with such poor equipment and weapons. There is a stark admission of the unpleasant truth that it may well be better to die than to be saved after horrible injury. And - very unusual in British war books this – there’s an entirely credible account of a badly-wounded officer asking a soldier to finish him off, and the soldier actually obliging with two shots to the head. There are thoughts of death, hell and judgement, of lives full of regrets, from a wrongly-smacked child to a cruel word spoken, which can never now be put right because it is most unlikely anyone will survive this. There is a fine description of the malevolence of bombing planes.

And there is, to me, a highly significant moment when the guns at Dunkirk fall silent, and one of the characters wonders if this means the British Expeditionary Force has surrendered. This, after all, very nearly happened and could easily have done so, leaving our entire army as helpless hostages in the hands of Hitler. I still think that the Dunkirk rearguard, French and British, who fought on, as Trevor says, with no hope of rescue and nothing to look forward to but a prison camp or a grave, deserve more credit and more detailed commemoration. But I think that would be hard to do, without gnawing away at the edge of the Dunkirk legend.

As I have said several times here, this was the end of the war which began in September 1939. Britain and France had challenged Germany, as everyone had told them they must, though without ever explaining exactly how or why, and they had been definitively beaten. The war that would follow would be between Germany and the USSR, and later the USA, with Britain as a subsidiary ally of the future superpowers, not determining the outcome or dedicating the terms.

You might say that independent British Foreign Policy, in continuous existence since the days of Henry VIII, died at Dunkirk.

Now, I’ll just mention the morally dubious incident, because I suspect that most British people, reading it, will sympathise with the officer who mercilessly forces his convoy through a crowd of French refugees, fearing he is about to be trapped and then caught by German aircraft. So do I, even though it seems to me that this account suggest strongly that several refugees died as a result. Trevor is unusually coy, perhaps because in 1955 those involved in the real event, which I have little doubt took place, might still have feared consequences if it was too accurately described, and someone decided to investigate.

But then what? What sort of war was this, really?

If, as a nation, we had really wanted to know, we might have bought this book in greater numbers than we did, and it might be better-known. But, as usual, we prefer the golden myth to the base-metal truth, and so here we are.

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04 September 2013 5:21 PM

Here comes Hitler again, plus evil dictators in general, appeasement and the rest of the bits and pieces, board, dice, tokens, model ships and planes, and wads of other people’s money that are to be found in that much-loved Westminster and Washington DC board game, ‘How to Start a War’.

I was just wondering, on Sunday morning, how long it would be before Syria’s President Assad would be compared to Adolf Hitler, and the American Secretary of State John Kerry almost immediately obliged by saying Assad had ‘joined the list of Hitler and Hussein’ who had used evil chemical weapons. Alas, all kinds of countries have used these weapons. Many that never used them still made and stockpiled them. If the possession or use of chemical weapons is itself a crime, few major powers are clean. Winston Churchill’s own personal attitude to this matter is interesting, and characteristically robust, but does not fit too well with the ‘Assad as Hitler and Obama as Churchill’ narrative.

It was perhaps a pity that a picture of Mr Kerry, and his spouse, dining with the future Hitler-substitute Bashar Assad (and his spouse, once the subject of an admiring profile in ‘Vogue’, now withdrawn) swiftly emerged from the archives . But what is that greenish fluid they are all about be given to drink?

Perhaps it wasn’t a pity. I myself find the wild mood-swings of the leaders of the ‘West’ , in their attitudes towards foreign despots, very informative. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Order of the Bath springs to mind, not to mention the reunited German state’s belated vendetta against Erich Honecker, whom they had once entertained and met as a diplomatic partner. And of course the very-swiftly-forgotten protests over Deng Xiaoping ‘killing his own people' in Peking’s Tiananmen Square, and the amazing licence granted to Boris Yeltsin to do things (including ‘shelling his own parliament’) which we would never approve of if Vladimir Putin did them. Though perhaps the Egyptian ‘stabilisation government’ or Junta, might get away with it. I see they are now charging Muslim brotherhood figures with murder, and nobody is laughing. As for Robert Mugabe, where does one begin?

These wild mood-swings inform me that their current spasms of outrage are false, and that the reasons they give for their behaviour are not reasons but pretexts, thus encouraging us all to search for the real reason. Does it lie in them, and in their flawed characters - or in some object they privately have, but won’t openly discuss? Perhaps both.

Mr Kerry (whose public speaking style I once unkindly compared to chloroform, after witnessing him alienate and bore a huge theatre full of American Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee) also proclaimed that ‘we’ (that is, the Executive of the US government) were ‘not going to lose’ the approaching vote on bombing Syria. This was delivered as a statement rather than a wish. Well, in that case, why hold the vote at all? I do think people should stop trying to influence votes by the stampede method, under which you persuade the more sheeplike voters that, by supporting you, they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Baaaa.

If you actually believe in debate, and people making up their minds on the basis of the arguments, this is surely an outrage. Of course, if you don’t actually believe in unpredictable votes, and cynically regard all this debate stuff as top-dressing for absolute power, then that’s another matter.

But Hitler always comes into this because he is part of a cult, the cult of the good war and the finest hour, one of whose branches is the cult of the nice bomb and the moral bomber.

According to the scriptures of this cult, a wicked dictator called Hitler was overcome by a brave and good democrat called Winston Churchill. Churchill triumphed at Dunkirk, and then fought Hitler to save the Jews from the Holocaust, also liberating Europe at D-Day, so that we all lived happily ever after. A group of people carrying umbrellas, called the ‘appeasers’ and led by a man called ‘Chamberlain’, wickedly opposed Churchill and gave in to Hitler at Munich. If it had not been for them, Hitler would have been seen for what he was, attacked and overthrown long before.

Regular readers of this weblog will know that this version of events contains some nuggets of truth – Hitler was evil and was defeated, Churchill had many noble qualities. Britain, though defeated on land in 1940, was not invaded. But they will also, I think, admit that a) it is far from complete and b) there are probably millions of people in Britain and the USA who believe something very similar to the above, about the events of 1938-45. This, alas, still influences their judgement when their leaders try to get them to go to war.

The most fanatical followers of this cult are, however, not just harmless members of a re-enactment society spending their weekends making ‘Boom!’ and ‘eeeee—ow!’ noises as they play with their Dinky toys and Airfix models in the attic.

They re-enact this myth in the form of actual red war, and are to be found among professional politicians in Britain and America. These initiates periodically choose a new person to take the role of ‘Hitler’. This can be almost anybody, including such minor figures as Manuel Noriega of Panama.

For, in the ritual of the Churchill cultists, the important thing is not who takes the part of Hitler, but who takes the part of Churchill, and who takes the part of Chamberlain.

And the smaller the would-be Churchills get, the smaller the alleged Hitlers get too. Note that, despite its many crimes against the laws of civilisation, the Chinese People’s Republic has never been called upon to play the part of Hitler, nor is it likely to be.

Invariably, the American or British leader calling for war imagines he is Churchill. Invariably, those who oppose the war are classified as appeasers and equated with ‘Chamberlain’. And invariably, the targeted dictator is classified as ‘Hitler’.

The awful truth of the Second World War is that it is much more complicated than that, that it was not fought to rescue the Jews (and largely failed to do so) and that many entirely innocent and harmless people did not experience it or its aftermath as ‘good’; also, that of its two principal victors (neither of whom was Britain, despite Churchill’s role) one, Stalin, was as evil a dictator was one might find in a long day’s search.

Which is why western schoolchildren learn little about the Soviet Army’s part in the defeat of the evil Hitler, or indeed about Churchill’s increasingly subservient, not to say appeasing , relationship with Stalin in the later years of the war. Or why so little is said about how slight Britain’s direct contact with the land forces of Nazi Germany was between 1940 and 1944. Let alone of the complex diplomacy which brought Britain into war with Germany in September 1939.

Let’s discuss some of this. Just before my recent journey to Berlin, I visited my favourite second hand bookshop in search of serendipity, and there found, in stout 1960s Penguin editions priced at three shillings and sixpence, a book I hadn’t read for years (A.J.P. Taylor’s ‘The Origins of the Second World war’ and a book I had never read but felt I should have done ,Len Deighton’s ‘Funeral in Berlin’).What could have been better travel reading, on a journey to Berlin undertaken close to the 74th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Great War?

I must say I think Deighton’s best work was done elsewhere, and later. But ‘Funeral in Berlin’. Like ‘The Ipcress File’, is tremendously redolent of the rather ghastly 1960s period of iconoclasm, David Frost, the King’s Road and all the rest of it. The buzzing, headachy urgency of the language, the miasma (as Kingsley Amis called it) of expensive king-sized cigarettes and fashionable whiskies. You can almost hear the narrow lapels creaking and the Soho jazz grating on the ear (as Krushchev put it) like a tram accident. It also makes one think of the brilliant encapsulation of that whole rather horrible era in the opening moments of the Michael Caine film of ‘Ipcress’ . Bad old ways were being cast aside, to be replaced by bad new ways.

Deighton was also years ahead of John le Carre’s ‘A Perfect Spy’ in making the point that spies themselves are more like each other than they are like the people who employ them, and that their mutual understanding (which looks like betrayal to the rest of us) casts doubt on the ideologies whose spearheads they are.

I didn’t myself think it evokes the old East Berlin very much. Reading it in my rented, westernised flat in the Heinrich Heine Strasse (a few hundred yards from a former border crossing), with a fine view of the TV tower and the old Red Rathaus, I felt he’d somehow missed the real feeling of the murky, thrilling city I still remember so well. But there are some unpleasant and disturbing thoughts on how much of the wicked Nazi state, especially its secret service, survived the death of Hitler. And, put in the mouth of a German war veteran, there are some unsettling remarks about how much Britain experienced war, in comparison with either Germany or Russia.

Taylor, on the other hand, wears very well. His writing remains clear, intelligent and perceptive. He invites the reader into a sort of complicity. Look, he says, most people couldn’t bear this much reality, but you and I can. Sit down and listen to this…

His dismissal of the importance of the Hossbach memorandum, supposedly a sinister deep-laid plan for war, actually an inconsequential political ploy, his casual mention of the fact that the Czech president Emil Hacha, was not ‘summoned’ to Berlin in 1939 but sought the meeting himself, and a dozen other myth-cracking torpedoes, all still have the freshness they must have had when his book was published (to howls of rage) in 1961.

I must say I find his argument that Hitler was a wild improviser, and that French and British attitudes towards him, Germany and Eastern Europe were incompetent and often absurd, much more persuasive than the standard narrative. He also offers a better explanation than anyone else of how (through a series of bungles and miscalculations) Britain ended up madly guaranteeing Poland and so giving Colonel Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, the power to start a general European war whenever he chose. He chose September 1939, and much good it did him.

Nobody reading this work would be impressed by the diplomatic skills of politicians, or anxious to offer them any power to start wars. They do not, for the most part, have a clue what they are doing. They claim success if it turns out all right, and are never there when the booby prizes for failure, death and loss are being awarded.

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07 May 2012 4:16 PM

At the beginning of Arthur Koestler’s extraordinary book ‘The Scum of the Earth’ he ponders on what was - in 1939 - the great unsolved problem of Europe. How could France, a country of bread and wine, co-exist next door to Germany, a nation of blood and iron? Germany must surely dominate, thanks to its greater population and its industrial and economic might. The war of 1871, and French defeat by Prussia, had shown how powerful Germany was. The costly victory of 1918 had shown just how much blood France would have to shed to stay out of Germany’s shadow.

Yet France was still, in 1939, not willing to accept German domination of Europe.

Koestler, a Communist ex-spy and journalist, a Hungarian national and general troublemaker, was rounded up by the French Republic on the outbreak of war and put into a grim prison camp for subversive aliens, at Le Vernet in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Somehow, he got out again, just in time to be caught in Paris as the Germans arrived, and to be rounded up again.

The story of his escape, quite possibly mendacious, is at the heart of this neglected book, and is a great evocation of the absurdities, terrors, miseries and hilarities of a great nation collapsing.

I have never been one of the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ mockers of France. France is a martial nation and its people know how to fight, as I should have thought Verdun proved beyond any doubt (that’s if you had forgotten Austerlitz, Marengo, Jena and a dozen other Napoleonic triumphs, and the awkward fact that England lost the Hundred Years War – plus the even more annoying fact, for those who jeer about there being no French military victories, that the decisive American triumph over Britain at Yorktown was really the work of the French Admiral de Grasse, and of French army officers such as Lafayette. French soldiers fought on long after British troops had left via Dunkirk, and the garrison of one part of the Maginot Line refused to surrender to the Germans until personally ordered to do so by the Minister of Defence).

The story of the final days of an independent France, the last meeting of a Free National Assembly, the last editions of free newspapers, is a bitterly sad one, and I see no reason to believe things would have been much different if the Germans had been able to get their army on to our Island.

So then we come to Vichy, that very curious episode, disowned by modern France but organically connected to it. Vichy was an anomaly, and like all anomalies it is very instructive. We’ve almost all seen the film ‘Casablanca’ and its ambiguous villain-cum-hero Captain Renault is by far the most interesting person in it (By the way, as far as I can discover, ‘the ‘Marseillaise’ remained the French national anthem under Vichy, which makes a bit of a nonsense of the ‘duel of the anthems’ scene in which singing it is shown as an act of rebellion). Reflecting that ambiguity, the USA and Canada both had diplomatic relations with the officially neutral Petain regime until well into the war (The US Ambassador, Admiral Leahy, was recalled in the summer of 1942). The USSR recognised Petain until June 1941, when Vichy supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

By contrast, British troops and airmen, especially in the Middle east, were several times in direct and often rather bitter combat with Vichy military units. The British attack on the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940 had provided the foundation for a lasting enmity. A recent interesting book (‘England’s last war Against France’ by Colin Smith describes this rather sad conflict).

Just as the French resistance has been magnified in later years, the extent of French acceptance of the German New Order has been minimised.

After Charles de Gaulle, who by sheer force of personality revived France as a major country and maintained its independence of action within the European Union (as it then was not), the most important French politician of recent times was Francois Mitterrand, the last Socialist president of that country.

There is still what is called ‘controversy’ about exactly what Francois Mitterrand was doing in the Vichy era. His modern supporters make out that, even if he appeared to be working for the Vichy regime (as he did appear to be) he was in reality toiling under cover for the Resistance. He is even supposed to have accepted a medal from the Petain state, the Francisque, because he had been ordered to accept it for the purposes of maintaining his Resistance cover.

Well, maybe. When the award of the Francisque to Mitterrrand was originally revealed in post-war France, he denied having received it at all. Why do that if he had accepted it as cover for some noble act of courage in the resistance? Then there was the odd story of his arranging to have a wreath laid annually on the grave of Marshal Petain (the Vichy head of state). My guess is that , like many intelligent Frenchmen of the time, he was facing both ways, waiting to see who won. Maybe he continued to face both ways, just a little, and perhaps to feel that he had good excuses for doing so.

We have to remember that until the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942, most people on the European continent were resigned to living under Berlin domination for the foreseeable future. Typical of these was the interesting (and ultimately repellent and disgraceful) Pierre Laval, an originally socialist politician of some significance and intelligence, who concluded in 1940 that the future was German and acted accordingly, so ending his days in front of a firing squad after a pretty wretched parody of a trial. I wonder who his British equivalent would have been, had the situation arisen?

But to return to Mitterrand, he was President of France when German diplomatic power once again became irresistibly dominant on the European landmass, after reunification of Germany in 1989. And it was under his Presidency that France participated in the accelerated integration of Europe pushed through by another French socialist, Jacques Delors, and the European Community became the embryo state now known as the European Union. It is my theory that this EU, though not as some say a ‘Fourth Reich’ does attempt to deal with Koestler’s conundrum – how can France, proud, patriotic, independent-minded, co-exist with Germany without losing her dignity? The French, confronted with the horrible choice between the two ‘V’s, Verdun or Vichy, can hardly be blamed if instead they choose Brussels. Nor can the Low Countries and Denmark, who have well understood since 1940 that their sovereignty is conditional upon German goodwill (by the way, the model occupation of Denmark by Germany is a historical episode which has had far too little attention. Denmark had a Social Democratic government and a functioning Parliament until the end of 1941, though it was under Berlin control at the time). As for Italy, well, that’s still more complicated. This isn’t the occasion for a re-examination of the Hoare-Laval Pact, but I wonder what would have happened if it had gone ahead. Yes, it was the same Pierre Laval.

For France (whose dreams of independent power perished, as did ours, at Suez in 1956), the EU has been a clever arrangement to provide grandeur and soothe feelings in a time of decline. I have discussed elsewhere the Elysee Treaty of 1963, under which France long ago agreed to share domination of Europe with Germany. The bargain has been very fruitful for France because of the Common Agricultural Policy, because of France’s unchallenged seat on the United Nations Security Council, because of France’s continued maintenance of a nuclear strike force and of some of the most significant conventional armed forces in the world, not to mention maintaining its equivalent of the British Commonwealth, the ‘Francophonie’.

Germany, meanwhile, has been able to get on quietly with becoming the industrial and economic superpower of Europe, the chief power in the European Central Bank, using the Euro as a means to devalue the Deutschemark and so aid its exports to non-EU countries. It has also been able to resume, peacefully, the diplomatic directions which it has been seeking since 1871 – domination of the Balkans and the Baltic states, also of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Carpathia and the Western Ukraine (look at the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for a map of pre-Hitler German aims in the east, plainly stated, and see how many of them have now been achieved under the banner of the EU).

I do not think a new president in France will really be able to challenge this arrangement, or much want to, whatever the election rhetoric may have been. The whole EU seems to me to be an admission that it simply is not worth anyone trying to question German pre-eminence any more. That is what pro-EU apologists mean when they say that the EU has ‘prevented war in Europe since 1945’. It has prevented it by bringing about longstanding German foreign policy aims, by consent and peacefully, and without the national humiliation and bankruptcy attendant on war and subjugation.

By the way, these German aims pre-existed Hitler and were held to by democratic and respectable German statesmen, including some of the July plotters who sought to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi state. They should not be confused with the National Socialist polices of extermination and racial murder with which they became entangled after 1933.

This seldom mentioned but often remembered period of modern European history, the period of unquestioned German dominance between Dunkirk and Stalingrad, is one of the many reasons why Britain, which was not militarily defeated or occupied, and did not suffer a tyranny of its own making before 1945, simply is not suited to EU membership.

I mention it because of claims that Francois Hollande will challenge Angela Merkel over aspects of EU rule. I honestly doubt it. That conflict is over.

The wider question, of whether the poorer, smaller countries at the fringes of Europe are prepared to stay inside the Eurozone to suit German aims, is a different one. Unlike the central part of the European project, which is ugly but conforms to the facts of life and power, the relationship between the northern and southern European countries looks to me to be unsustainable. Spain, Greece and Portugal badly need to devalue, which means leaving the Eurozone. I am not sure how this can be avoided for much longer, though the current awful situation has endured long after many believed it would collapse.

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01 June 2010 4:57 PM

Mr ‘Demetriou’ seems to be having one of his oppositional phases again. I shall just have to cope with it. But I'd like to pursue for a moment the question of Dunkirk, raised in my MoS column on Sunday. Among my childhood reading was an austere drab volume, printed on coarse paper under the 'War Economy Standard', called ‘Battle Dress’. Its author's name was given as 'Gun Buster'. This seems to have been the pseudonym of a Captain in the Royal Artillery called John Austin, though there may be some doubt about this. It was said on the cover to be the companion to another book called 'Return via Dunkirk', which we did not have and in those pre-Internet days had no easy way of finding (I have since tracked it down and read it).

What struck me about it then, and strikes me even more now that I have read the companion volume, is that it is extraordinarily gloomy and pessimistic. When I think of it now, it bears almost no resemblance to the idea we have of that war. This, I think, is because it was written during that period when Britain had lost the 'First' Second World War (1939-40) in which she was for the last time a major power, and had yet to be comforted by its role as ally of the two victors in the 'Second' Second World War (1941-45).

It is a series of short stories about a defeat, set in Northern France in the summer of 1940, or in England soon afterwards. The stories often have unhappy endings, concern withdrawals and retreats, and speak knowledgeably about such things as the bowel-melting horror of being at the receiving end of a Stuka attack, the nightmares soldiers have long after the battles they fought and the frustration and mystery of being trapped on a beach between the enemy and the sea, with authority breaking down and no certainty of rescue. One contains a remarkably spare account of a man's death, obviously drawn from a real event. Another deals with the anguish of a career officer ruled medically unfit for further service.

In the comforting safety of post-war southern England, in which we endlessly celebrated the fact that we had 'Won the War', I remember being faintly irritated by these stories. All we knew about the war, as Max Hastings pointed out on the radio the other day, was the 'Miracle' of Dunkirk, the glorious Battle of Britain, El Alamein and D-Day. The bits in between, and the wider truth about many of these events were largely unknown, as they still are.

Now I recognise the works of 'Gun Buster' as rather astute and grown-up war propaganda, which must have had some trouble getting authorisation from the Ministry of Information, accustoming people to the long haul ahead, its privations and pains, and the fact that we faced a tenacious and effective enemy. They were remarkably honest portrayals of what battle was like, and of retreat. Maybe we were actually more realistic about the state of things in those long months between Dunkirk and Stalingrad, than we have since become.

Much later, reading Evelyn Waugh's 'Sword of Honour' trilogy, I found a similar harsh realism. I still think this is Waugh's most important work, because of its profound rejection of idealism about the war. It is only the rather unresolved ending that spoils it. It would have been good to read an Evelyn Waugh novel about the 1960s which resulted from the failure of the war, but alas it was never written.

There is a cold moment, near the end of the trilogy, when the hero (or anti-hero) Guy Crouchback confesses that he entered the war in a spirit of crusading idealism. He is comforted by Madame Kanyi (a Jewish refugee whom he will try and fail to save from a nasty fate at the hands of Britain's Yugoslav Communist 'allies'). She says: ‘Even good men thought that by going to war, they could win a kind of honour.’ He replies: ‘God forgive me. I was one of them.’ In my view, the book would have been best ended exactly there.

Much earlier in the war (I think this is in 'Men at Arms') Guy Crouchback is in Scotland during the issuing of new boots when a near-hysterical regular officer bursts in to the hut and starts gabbling sarcastically that the boots will be fine as long as they are the right sort of boots for running away in - he has just heard the news of the collapse of the Western Front and the beginnings of the headlong retreat to the Channel, which he regards as an utter disgrace. Again, in the light of the Dunkirk myth, this mingled shame and panic do not seem right. But once again, I'm sure they were drawn from the life. There's also a brief bitter description of the defeat in Norway, when the Phoney War turned frightening and nasty in 'Put Out More Flags', another of Waugh's books that ought to get more attention than it does.

Then there was an excellent film about the great retreat ('Dunkirk', made in 1958, starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee). But it flopped because - despite one or two moments of musically-enhanced patriotic feeling - it was generally pretty gloomy about Phoney War Britain and the wretched unpreparedness of our government for what was coming. The central figure was a sceptical journalist unwilling to believe the propaganda of the time. The misery and fear of the beaches was also quite starkly portrayed. In 1958, the public didn't much want that sort of thing. They still don't. There is still a deep unwillingness to look calmly at what actually happened to this country in 1940, or to wonder if any different outcome was possible.

Almost all discussions of the 1940 disaster concentrate on the decisive few days when Churchill swung the Cabinet behind his policy of 'no negotiations'. I think this is the wrong moment. There really was no choice. Churchill was able to win them round because by that stage Britain was a defeated belligerent and talking with Hitler would have been a road to humiliation and penury without hope of rescue. To negotiate would be to admit defeat. To admit defeat would have been to demoralise the population - which had only reluctantly accepted the need for war - and destroy any remaining war effort. How could we return to war if we had opened talks with Hitler or Mussolini? The spirit would have been gone. The act of seeking terms would have changed everything.

Also it was plain from the way the French were being treated (and from Germany's 1917 peace with Russia at Brest-Litovsk) that we would have been made to pay an appalling price for peace - not so much out of vengeance or spite, but because Germany needed things which we had, and would have taken advantage of the chance to grab them. Her leaders would have wanted us neutralised for ever, while Berlin got on with its real aim of invading the USSR. Hitler would have been an idiot (which in general he wasn't) if he had left us enough economic strength, or colonial possessions, or military hardware to rebuild our forces. We would have had to scrap or hand over much of the Navy and Air Force, much of our Merchant Marine as well, and pay very large indemnities, as well as probably supplying a lot of conscript labour and much of our Gold and Dollar reserves to the National Socialist War Machine.

I don't think Churchill really imagined that Roosevelt's terms for coming in on 'our' side (actually for coming in on his own side) would prove to be so heavy that we would still be paying off the debt half a century after and the British Empire would entirely vanish. But even if he had known I think he would have preferred them to the alternative. *By that time* there was no other sensible course but to fight on and hope for the best. The harsh laws of war say that if you declare war (as we had done), and then lose it, you can't really complain at what your enemy does to you - hence the old Roman saying 'Vae Victis' - 'Woe to the defeated'. The important question is, would we have been in a stronger position if we had stayed out of the war, either for longer, or altogether?

So the great decision to 'stand alone' was a rational one. Terms with Hitler would not gave gained us much, if anything at all. And they would have left us vulnerable to further demands once Hitler had polished off Stalin, which he would have done with ease if we were permanently out of the war (but which would have been much harder if we had still been an unresolved threat at his rear, see below). If we fought on, we at least had some chance of remaining an independent nation of some sort, even if it was much poorer and weaker and its Empire was gone (pretty much what happened). And that unpleasant bargain was the one we struck. We still live with it. But was it necessary that we should have faced that choice?

The real question was why we had allowed ourselves to get into this mess in the first place. We know from a study of history (one reader rightly recommended Pat Buchanan's largely-ignored volume 'The Unnecessary War' as a dissenting guide to the appeasement years) that even the bellicose Mr Churchill was uninterested in war in 1936, the only point at which France and Britain could effortlessly have stopped Hitler's rise.

There was likewise no serious opposition to the Austrian Anschluss. And it remains debatable whether a war over Czechoslovakia in 1938 would have been any easier to fight than the one over Poland in 1939. Yes, the Czech defences were good - but they did not cover the border with Austria which had now fallen into Hitler's hands. And it is highly doubtful that France or Britain would have tried to invade Germany from the West - an action they weren't prepared, equipped or trained for, and for which their leaders had no appetite then or later.

No, the real questions are quite different. Why did we give a guarantee to Poland in April 1939, which meant that we were completely at the mercy of the Polish state, which could decide to drag us into war at a time of its choosing? Did we really care who owned Danzig, or the corridor? And, as I have said here before, our promise was militarily worthless. We had no forces with which to fulfil it. And we didn't do anything with the forces we had except sit about in Northern France, attempt a blockade which was largely useless because Hitler's key supplies came by land from his ally Stalin, and drop leaflets on German cities from the air. It's true (and the film 'Dunkirk' makes this point) that the Navy was quite heavily engaged against the Germans. But Germany wasn't a major sea-power (at that time she didn't even have very many submarines) and could do little more than sink merchant vessels - though one U-boat did get into Scapa to sink the 'Royal Oak'. Italy at this time was also not wholly committed to Hitler.

Without the absurd Polish guarantee (which didn't save Poland) we - and the French - would have had a much greater range of choice. We could have behaved much more like Roosevelt, perhaps letting others fight for us (as we have historically done in continental wars) while building up our forces and preserving our resources. That would have compelled Hitler to keep reserves on his Western flank, and so weakened any attack he made on the USSR. A war in which Hitler and Stalin fought each other to a standstill, or which one of them won at colossal cost, while we steadily rearmed (and kept our Asian Empire) might then have taken place. I doubt very much if the fate of anyone in Europe would have been any worse under those circumstances than it was thanks to our supposedly noble intervention. It might even have been better.

So the important thing is to look away from the 'Finest Hour', by which time we were irrevocably committed, and wonder if we might have had a much finer hour later if we had shown more sense.

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29 May 2010 9:49 PM

I suppose we shall have to get used to ­living in a mad country. We’re alleged to be a democracy and we have a government that absolutely nobody voted for. We’re overcrowded and all our public services are at breaking point, so we encourage mass immigration.

Family breakdown is the main cause of social disorder, so we continue with the policies that make it happen. Comprehensive education has failed completely, so we make it ­illegal to open new grammar schools. Many of our key power stations will soon have to close, so we plan to replace these with futile windmills that only work… when the wind is blowing.

Oh, and we try ten-year-old boys, too young to be capable of the sex act, for a supposed rape for which there was no physical evidence. This is disastrous for all the children involved, who are now marked for life by an incident that would have been much ­better forgotten.

But it is also a symptom of what has happened to the official mind. Can you imagine the scared, wooden-headed process that led to this tragi-comedy?

My guess is that the police and the CPS were frightened of being publicly martyred by our sex-obsessed culture, which combines an almost total neglect of children with a sickly sentimentalisation of them. They swallowed the conventional wisdom that James Bulger and Baby Peter were the victims of failed state intervention, rather than of unrestrained, fearless human evil.

Then there’s the trial itself, the process of justice turned into a nursery game, so as not to frighten the little ones. On this occasion, two other children – too young to face adult justice – were on trial. But it could have been an adult. This foolish episode, rather than being seen as an over-reaction to a nasty but forgettable episode, is now being used as an argument for yet more steps to make it easier for children to give evidence.

This is just an attempt by Left-wing reformers to use the trial as an excuse to get what they want anyway. It doesn’t follow at all, and is very dangerous. Children who make criminal accusations – and the adults who encourage them to do so, often for their own ends – should learn very quickly indeed that the law and the courts are utterly terrifying. They should have to stand in gloomy, intimidating courtrooms, in the ­presence of the person they accuse. They should be cross-examined rigorously.

Judges should wear wigs and deliver freezing lectures on the wickedness of telling lies. There should be no teddy bears, video screens or bottles of syrupy fluid for them to clutch and suck. Because children are suggestible and they can lie, even while holding teddies and slurping blackcurrant juice, and those lies can send an innocent person to prison for many years, and how else are they going to understand this?

This isn’t playtime. It’s a nasty, unforgiving game called ‘Shall we ruin the defendant’s life, or not?’ Those who think this is hard on the children have a simple solution. Don’t pros­ecute on the basis of what they say. If a child’s testimony can’t stand up in hard conditions, then it shouldn’t be taken seriously in law. But above all, this case was about the rape of innocence. There was a time not at all long ago when children knew almost nothing of sex. Now they can’t avoid it if they watch TV, and are incessantly taught about its most loveless aspects in schools.

In one particularly ghastly moment in this trial, we learned how a police officer asked one of the boys what he knew about sex. The boy replied: ‘I don’t know what it means.’ Asked how to make a baby, he replied: ‘We need a man there and need a woman and that’s it. I don’t want to tell you this.’

Those words ‘I don’t want to tell you this’ move me profoundly. Despite all the filth and slime by which he had been surrounded, at school and on TV, the boy had still preserved an essential modesty about things that he instinctively knew should remain private. And what kind of country is it whose police officers think they have to mouth phrases from a sex-education manual? I will tell you. It is a mad country.

Oily Fry and a great big fuzzy flop...

Stephen Fry’s voice and manner generally make me switch off the radio – that strange mixture of hair oil and molasses, bubbling with self-satisfied giggles, is more than I can take at any time of day. But now the BBC’s favourite voice is actively promoting the nasty scheme to make us all scrap our perfectly good radio sets and embrace digital broadcasting.

Now, Mr Fry is so busy presenting every programme on BBC Radio and TV that he probably never listens to the wireless, and so doesn’t know what the rest of us know – that digital sound broadcasting is a great big fuzzy, unreliable flop. And if everybody keeps their FM sets, we may yet defeat this scheme.

By the way, I am noticing growing resistance to self-service tills at supermarkets. Insist on being served by a human. Or soon there will be nothing but automatic tills, all talking like Stephen Fry. ‘Unexpected item in bagging area. Tee-hee.’

Dunkirk: Are we finally ready to face the truth?

I think enough time has passed since Dunkirk for us to admit the truth about it. It was not a triumph, but a terrible national defeat – surpassed in the 20th Century only by the other Churchillian catastrophe of Singapore in 1942.

Having entered a war for which we were wholly unready, for a cause which was already lost, at a time we did not choose and with allies on whom we could not rely, we were flung off the continent of Europe in weeks. Only thanks to a double devil’s pact did we survive as a nation.

We sold our economy and our empire to Franklin Roosevelt’s USA, and we handed half of Europe to Joseph Stalin’s homicidal tyranny. They won the war in the end, though we had to contribute many lives to their victory. Then we looked on as they rearranged the world.

Sooner or later, the fuzzy, cosy myth of World War Two and our ‘Finest Hour’ will fade. We once needed to pretend Dunkirk was a triumph. If we are to carve our way in a hostile world, we now need to understand – as those who were actually on the beaches well knew – that it wasn’t any such thing.

* Our leaders have never been able to agree on why our troops are – still – dying and being maimed in Afghanistan. Various drivel has emerged from the mouths of politicians from Baron Comrade ‘Dr’ John Reid (‘without a shot being fired’) to Gordon Brown himself. How refreshing, then, to hear Dr Liam Fox accurately describing it as a broken 13th Century country, in which our nation-building is futile. Yet he was disavowed – for telling the truth. Why? * Listen to the praise heaped on Exile On Main Street and the Rolling Stones by the legions of retarded adolescents who crowd our cultural media. The story of the recording of this crude gibberish is one of criminal squalor – hangers-on using children as drug mules, promiscuity and debauchery. It tells you all you need to know about the nature of rock music. When will we grow out of it?

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